Consider Me (Playing For Keeps Book 1)

OLIVIA

THE TIME on my phone tells me it’s four in the morning.

This is the third time I’ve woken, and for a reason I can’t explain, there’s a pit of unease inside me that grows bigger each time.

I don’t have a single message from Carter, and while I know he’s out with his team, he’s never gone this long without a word. Even when he knows I’m sleeping I often wake up to multiple messages telling me how much he loves me or what he’s going to do to me when he gets home.

But tonight? Nothing.

It’s an irrational fear, probably. They won the cup. They’re celebrating; they deserve to.

But something feels wrong, so I bite the bullet and dial his number.

When it goes directly to voice mail, the sinking feeling in my stomach grows exponentially.

Lying back in bed, I hug his pillow to me. It smells like him, fresh citrus with a hint of smoky woods, but it doesn’t help me fall back asleep. When the anxiety starts to creep in, I have a difficult time reminding myself how to breathe properly.

When my phone rings twenty minutes later, I scramble over the edge of the bed.

“Liv?” Cara’s voice is low, but I hear the slight edge in her tone.

“What is it? Is everything okay?” I do a shit job of hiding my panic.

“It’s…yeah. It’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Em just got home. He was wondering…is Carter there?”

“He’s not home yet. Didn’t they leave together?”

There are muted ramblings, like Cara’s covering the phone. “Emmett said Carter came back to the table after we left, grabbed his suit jacket, and took off without a word. He never…he never came back. Em figured he went home to you, but they’ve been calling him all night, and—”

“His phone’s off.” I breathe the words that burn like acid. “I can’t get a hold of him.” Throwing my legs over the edge of the bed, I grip my stomach, keeling forward. There’s a vice around my heart, squeezing tight, and I feel like I’m going to vomit. I can’t calm myself fast enough to tell myself that Carter’s safe, that he’s okay. “I can’t…what if…what if he got in an accident? What if he’s hurt?” I rub at my chest, trying to ease the pain.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Cara insists gently. It’s the voices in the background that are anxiously muttering, wondering where their friend is, their team captain. “Do you want me to come over and wait with you?”

“No, I’m…I’m fine.” The lie tastes sour, like it disagrees with my stomach, and I shake my head, eyes squeezed shut. “He’s fine. I’ll text you when he gets home.”

I spend the next hour pacing the bedroom and sitting on the balcony, scrolling aimlessly through my phone, waiting for a text message, a phone call that never comes.

It’s shortly after five in the morning that I’m tagged in the first series of photos from a popular gossip account.

The first is of me and Carter kissing outside the restaurant. The second picture is Carter from behind. It’s dark, but the people hugging each of his arms are unmistakably female, one with long red hair, the other blonde. They’re stepping inside a building.

A hotel.

The caption?

Stanley Cup champ Carter Beckett can’t resist the bunnies postwin.

Beckett, seen here with girlfriend, high school teacher Olivia Parker, a mere hour before he disappears inside a hotel with two females!

The pictures keep rolling in. Endless photos, all from different angles, and my heart shatters inside my chest when I catch a glimpse of the faces of the beautiful women on his arms.

The blonde from outside the bathroom in the restaurant.

And Courtney.

The captions, somehow, get worse. There are old pictures of Courtney and Carter, speculation that Carter is the reason Courtney and Adam broke up, that he’s been cheating on me with her the entire time. That I’m the young and naïve schoolteacher—and single mother of two, apparently—that fell for his charm, despite his lifestyle, despite the warning signs. That Carter fooled me.

My phone rings in my hand, Cara’s face on my screen, and I know she’s seen what I’ve seen. But she’s not who I need right now.

I need Carter. He’s the only one I need to see, to talk to. Because this isn’t right. It can’t be right. This isn’t Carter, not the man who’s so obsessively in love, who treats me like his queen. Not the man that moved me into his home and talks constantly about marriage and babies and forever.

There has to be an explanation, something they’re missing. Something we’re all missing.

It’s 7:16 a.m. when I hear the beep of the keypad on the front door.

I fly out of the bedroom and down the stairs as Carter steps into the house. I note his downcast gaze, the obvious heartache he carries that weighs him down, makes his shoulders sag, but I don’t stop until my body collides with his. I wrap my arms around him as tight as I can, needing to feel him, to know he’s okay.

I feel the way his broad body stiffens at my touch before he sinks into me, one hand in my hair, the other at my lower back, pressing me closer, holding me tighter.

My fingers press into his jaw as I try to force his gaze to mine, but it doesn’t come. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I love you.” The way he whispers my three favorite words, laced with brokenness, sounds like they’re not quite meant for me to hear.

Or maybe they are.

Just one last time.

“Carter,” I coax gently, stroking down the side of his face, over his rough stubble, the strong line of his rugged jaw. “Look at me, baby.”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t move a muscle, except for the almost imperceptible tic in his jaw, the vein pulsing in the side of his neck.

“Carter. Look at me.”

“I can’t,” he whispers, the words weak, shattered. Something wet drops, splattering onto my forearms where I’m reaching between us, holding his face in my hands.

Something inside me stretches past the point of painful. My body makes the decision to move, to step back, putting distance between us that my mind is trying to convince me we need, even though my heart is telling me to hang on.

“Did you get a room with them?”

Silence.

“Carter. Answer me. Did you get a room with them? Did you go upstairs?”

“Yes,” he croaks.

My hand flies to my mouth in an attempt to stifle my gasp. It doesn’t work. “What happened? What happened, Carter?” I beg him for an answer, but he doesn’t give me one. “You didn’t cheat on me, Carter. You didn’t.”

Carter’s head whips up, and for the first time since he’s walked in here, he looks at me. His bloodshot eyes, red rimmed and glossy, swimming with pain, land on me. He takes a half step forward, reaching for me, but pauses. His gaze drops to his outstretched arm, then back to me, cowering away from him.

“I-I…Olivia.” My name is a cry on his lips, a plea, or maybe an apology. I’m not sure.

But the next sound from my mouth is a garbled, strangled sob that makes his green eyes wild, and he finally takes that step toward me.

And I back up.

And up.

Until my back hits the wall and he reaches for me.

“No,” I cry, spinning out of reach. My chest heaves like it’s breaking, ripping wide open, and I can’t breathe properly. I place my palm over my heart, willing the pain to stop, but it doesn’t. I don’t know what to do, and when Carter whispers the next words, everything inside me feels like it’s broken.

“I’m so sorry.”

Tears freefall down both of our faces. “No.” I shake my head. “No.”

This can’t be real. This isn’t real. This isn’t Carter.

“Baby.” He moves cautiously toward me.

“No.” I rip my hands away. I can barely see through the tears as I stare up at him, the man I gave my everything to, the love that changed my life. “I trusted you.”

“I-I…I don’t…Olivia, I just…” Carter stops, dropping his face to his hands and muttering out a fuck I almost don’t hear. “I’m so stupid. I don’t know how to…it’s not…It’s broken, Ollie.”

I take the opportunity to move past him. Racing up the stairs, I grab my bag from the closet and fill it as fast as I can with whatever I can fit. Moving into the bathroom, I sweep my things off the counter and into the bag, and Carter’s behind me, shaking, frantic.

“No, no, no,” he chants, following my every move. “No, Ollie, you-you can’t. You can’t.”

He tears down the stairs behind me, looking like he’s on the verge of having a heart attack while I slip my sandals on my feet. That’s how I’m feeling, anyway. Like this heart is never going to function properly again.

Carter follows me as I slip out into the garage, and the only word he seems to be able to say is no as he watches me slip the key to his truck off my key ring and grab my car keys off the hook. I haven’t driven this thing in four months and the only way I know it’ll still run is because Carter turns it on once a week to keep the battery from dying. So considerate, always.

So, why? Why?

I can’t stick around to find out the answer to that question, since he seems intent on not sharing any information with me right now. I hit the button for the garage door, watching the one behind my car spring off the ground, and Carter turns absolutely feral, slamming my car door the second I open it.

“No! I won’t let you!”

With two hands on his chest, I shove him as hard as I can. I’m sobbing now, which makes my next words weak as hell, even if I’m yelling. “You don’t get to tell me what to do! You’re not in charge! I put all of my trust in you! All of it, Carter!” I choke on a sob, burying my face in my hands as I cry. “And you don’t even have the decency to tell me what happened. You’re not answering me! Talk to me!” I scream, gripping his shirt. “Please, Carter!”

His eyes bounce between mine, his strong hands holding onto mine. “I-I-I…I can’t,” he finally says. “I don’t know how.” He hangs his head in shame, defeated.

The end is supposed to be easier than the start. Because this isn’t the way this was supposed to go. Or maybe it’s exactly how it was always destined to end.

In this moment, I’m taken back to the night Carter convinced me to dance with him at the bar, the night I realized I was falling for a man I had no business falling for.

And I think the exact same thing I thought back then: slow dancing in a burning room.

That’s all we’ve been doing this entire time. Pretending the inevitable wouldn’t happen. That this all wouldn’t go up in flames.

But it is. This life we’ve built together, the future I put so much stock in, the forever I was so sure about it. It’s been doused in gasoline, torched.

My heart will never be the same after Carter Beckett.

Carter steps away from the car, allowing me to open the door. I throw my bag across the seat and start sliding in.

“I love you.” His words are shattered, gutting. “I love you, Ollie.”

“You know, I never doubted that until now.” Truth be told, there’s still some desperate, sadistic part of me that believes him, or wants to, at least. This man has done nothing but make me feel so overwhelmed with all his love: unwavering, wholesome, passionate, obsessive.

And yet here we are. This is the way it’s playing out. A way I expected when we first met, a way that kept me afraid and at a distance for too long. But not the way he’s made me feel over these last six months.

Still, it doesn’t stop me from telling him, “I’ll never stop loving you, even if you’ve broken me beyond repair.” I don’t know if that makes me weak or brave. I just know that even though I get in the car, throw it in reverse and start backing out of the driveway, it’s the last thing I want to do.

I watch Carter fall to pieces in the garage while I fall to pieces on the inside, and everything feels so utterly wrong, so devastatingly broken.

I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t have a home, and the person I need more than anything, the only person who can take all of this away, the pain, the heartache, is the one who’s brought it all in the first place.

Visiting hours don’t start until eight, so I sit in the parking lot and fall apart some more, until I’m sure I can’t be put back together. When I burst through the door of the suite, I find the man I’m looking for sitting at the small patio table on his balcony, looking nearly as defeated as I feel.

He lifts his head from his fist, weathered blue eyes searching blindly for his visitor.

My entire body crumbles to pieces as I cry out his name. “Hank.”

“Olivia.” He stands, spreading his arms out wide. “Come here, sweetheart.”